Fearproof Your Brain, Stress Relief Tips, And How To Meditate

–Muse and its creator Ariel Garten…01:18

• Muse (use code BENGREENFIELD to save 20%)
  • Headband that senses your brain and provides biofeedback
• Different features:
  • Digital sleeping pills
  • Guided meditation
  • Track what’s going on in your brain
• Intersection between biofeedback and meditation
• Ariel Garten
  • One of the world’s leading experts on biofeedback meets meditation
  • Founder of InterAxon – make Muse
  • Has a background in neuroscience at the University of Toronto
  • Researching Parkinson’s disease and hippocampal neurogenesis
• Ariel has also been into fashion design
  • Clothing line that was sold to stores in Toronto and New York
  • Help people understand who they are, how their brain and bodywork
• Thousands of studies demonstrate the impact of meditation on the brain and the body
• Trained as a therapist and had a private practice for a decade
  • Teaching people to meditate
  • Sucked at meditation herself
  • Decided to build a tool that would help her meditate

-How meditation helps with a highly active brain…08:05

• Ben developed most of his ideas by sitting quietly in the morning
• Ariel had problems with focusing, her mind wandered
  • Meditation enabled her to bring her mind back from wandering
• Meditation or quiet time and exercise – trains Ben’s brain’s distractibility
• Prefrontal cortex is the executive control center of your brain
  • Responsible for attention and inhibition
• The brain that bounces all over the place
  • Meditation improves the function of that part of the brain
• Problems with poor attention, poor inhibition, and hyperactive attention switching
• Dr. Sarah Lazar study – looks at long-term meditators and what happens to their brain
• As you age, the prefrontal cortex thins, and its function decreases
  • Meditation makes the brain younger and helps with attention and focus
• Meditation vs. brain training games
  • Brain training is a very specific workout for very specific parts and functions of the brain
  • Meditation training is like a global workout for the brain
  • The effects of brain games in the real world
• Brain games
• Training new skills in anything you do increases neuroplasticity
• Meditation is different than brain games
• The downregulation in the amygdala
• Long-term meditators show a decrease in the level of activity and the size of the amygdala

-More about meditation’s effects on the amygdala and prefrontal cortex…18:00

• Alex Honnold, rock climber
• The downregulation in the amygdala
  • Long-term meditators show a decrease in the level of activity and the size of the amygdala
  • Dropping down your fear response, dropping down your cortisol reactions
  • Generally improving your sympathetic and parasympathetic tone
• The amygdala is the fear center of the brain
• As your fear decreases, you can reach higher heights in your life
• The prefrontal cortex has a projection to the amygdala
  • The prefrontal cortex is the parent, and the amygdala is the child
• With a longer-term meditation process, the prefrontal cortex is able to better down-regulate the amygdala
• In meditation practice, what we learn to do is to observe the sensations in our body
  • As a meditator, you don’t go, “I’m afraid, this is awful,” – you go, “Hey, I’m feeling some sensation.”
• People are often overwhelmed with feelings that stimulate thoughts about feelings
  • Thoughts cause more emotional arousal
• In meditation, you learn to observe your thoughts and not buy into them
• If Ariel had a motto for life, it would be: “Feel the fear and do it anyway”
• Those who are able to succeed in life are those who are able to sit through discomfort
• Breathing and cold tub
• As soon as you feel afraid of something, dive into that thing
  • That’s the way to break it
• Stop Living on Autopilot by Anthony Neves

-What does meditation really do?…26:25

• Meditation is not simply having no thoughts
• Is a moving meditation a thing?
  • Depends what your mind is doing during the practice
• Meditation is not about the mind going blank
  • It’s about being able to observe your mental space and focus on one thing
• There are many different forms of meditation
  • Focused attention meditation
  • Moving meditation
• In meditation, you are fully engaged in one thing
  • But that thing is not your thoughts
• Move your mind away from it and back to your breath
• Building our metacognition
  • The awareness that your mind wanders, and then the choice to move attention elsewhere
• Ben’s experience with Transcendental Meditation (TM)
• Podcast with Philip Land:
• The object of your attention – the thing you return back to, to anchor your attention on
• Meditation is a simple activity that leads to incredible transformation
• Most of us just go through our life on autopilot
• The action of noticing your mind has wandered onto a thought and choosing to bring it back
• Liberating yourself from this endless stream of thought controlling your life
• Becoming the master of your thinking rather than subjected to it
  • It is building what we call metacognition, seeing your thoughts – the awareness of your thinking
• What does Ben do with thoughts he wants to remember during meditation?
  • Voice recording and visualization
  • Memory palace technique
• Ariel writes it down or gives it a number
• Walking meditation
  • Taking every step mindfully, feeling every step
• Meditation is the practice that you do, the sitting, the going to the gym that builds the skill of mindfulness
• Mindfulness is the present-moment awareness of your thoughts, feelings, sensations, environment

-The impact of meditation on the hippocampus and other benefits…39:36

• The hippocampus is the part of your brain associated with learning and memory
  • As you age, it shrinks
  • Cortisol causes shrinkage of the hippocampus
• Impact of meditation
  • Can reduce your cortisol levels
  • Corpus callosum, the part of your brain that connects your left and right hemisphere
  • Improve the density of your gray matter
  • Increase the activity in the temporal, parietal junction
• Ben and his sons visited the Peak Brain Institute
  • Sessions 30 to 60 minutes, twice a day during the week
  • Then did EEG
  • Noticed positive changes – realized that you can actually train the brain
• Podcast with Dr. Andrew Hill of the Peak Brain Institute

-How does Muse work?…44:36

• Muse (use code BENGREENFIELD to save 20%)
  • A clinical-grade EEG in a little headband
  • Gives real-time neurofeedback on your mind during meditation
  • Used by probably a thousand different research labs with 200 published papers
  • When using the Muse meditation app, get real-time neurofeedback on your mind during meditation
  • When your mind wanders, you get an audio cue that your mind has wandered
  • Data shows you what your brain was doing during the course of your meditation
  • Sensors 
    • Photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor for the heart
    • Movement sensors for your breath
    • Movement sensors track your body position orientation, gyroscope
• Ben’s experience with Muse
• Muse gives audio feedback and bio neurofeedback
  • The sounds you are hearing are always responding to your brain
• The sleep session and the meditation session
  • Tracking not only meditation but also sleep
• Muse S and Muse S Gen 2 is like there is a sleep lab in your own bed
  • Have the ability to track sleep as effectively as going to a sleep lab with a real polysomnography system
• Whoop
• Oura ring
• Muse has partners at the University of Ottawa and Rural Mental Health Center who have used Muse alongside a PSG to demonstrate the accuracy of data
• Muse as a digital sleeping pill
  • Tracking your level of sleep
    • Guided audio changes based on your brain, heart, breath, and body
  • As it sees you begin to enter into first stage of sleep, it starts to change the audio
    • Once you’re asleep, the audio shuts off
    • Throughout the night, it’s tracking your sleep
    • If you wake up, it waits a few minutes for you to fall asleep again on your own
    • If you don’t, it automatically brings in the same audio cue
• Improves sleep quality by 20%
• Muse gathers brain data, sending it to the phone, which does the processing
• Plug your own headphones into the phone or listen to the audio using the speaker
• Nucalm
• BrainTap
• Keeping the headband in place

– Stacking with supplements, smart drugs, nootropics, adaptogens…58:12

-The Mind Monitor app…1:01:04

• Mind Monitor – a third-party app
• If you want to just look at your brain waves and see what happens with your brain
• Shows your level of alpha, beta, theta, and delta brain waves
• Gives you all the raw Muse data so you can see your raw brainwave
• Great tool for biohacking play and experimentation 

-Future plans for Muse…1:02:47

• A lot of people that have been using Muse headbands for VR
• Developers have created amazing VR apps 
• Lots of studies have been done with Muse
  • Mayo Clinic
  • Bringing meditation and the device into the medical sphere properly
• Muse Connect
• Programs for clinicians
• Programs for companies
• Heads Up 
• Meditation enhancement chip technology
• Muse is Ben’s new favorite toy